On D-Day, Lower Saucon man hit Omaha Beach as Navy radioman

June 05, 2014|An interview by David Venditta, Of The Morning Call

Walter A.L. King, son of a paper maker in Ohio, raised homing pigeons as a Boy Scout and got an amateur radio license. In 1942, when he was 17, he ran away to Canada and joined the Royal Highland Regiment, known as the Black Watch, but was sent home months later because he was underage. As soon as he turned 18, he left high school to sign up for the Navy.

He was a 19-year-old radioman when he hit Omaha Beach early on June 6, 1944, D-Day.

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We'd been training all over England and Wales, and then we went into Swansea, Wales, and we loaded up on the ship and pulled out, and God it was storming like nobody's business and they turned around and went back into port. Then the next morning I feel the ship moving and we're pulling out. It was raining to beat hell.

There was a group of us in a beach battalion, and we were specialists in certain areas like communication, equipment maintenance. And we were assigned to different units of the Army — in my case, to the 2nd Ranger Battalion — and they issued us all Army uniforms and a weapon.

Our primary job was to get ashore safely, set up a radio station where we could communicate with the ships at sea and help them unload all their cargo and manpower.

We were on a makeshift troopship in the English Channel, and about 3 in the morning, they fed everybody breakfast. I had scrambled eggs, coffee, fruit juice, fresh-baked bread, some kind of fruit. We got our gear ready because they said we were going to go this time.

It was light enough when we left the ship that we could just make everything out. As far as you could see there were ships going to France. We went over the side and down the netting into the landing craft with our packs on. I had a Thompson submachine gun. You had to jump from the netting to the boats, and the sea was rough, up and down.

By the time we got halfway to the beach, in the middle of nowhere, we were getting heavy fire. There were many, many landing craft coming in at the same time, but as I looked around I could see that we were actually in the first wave.

It was calm and then all of a sudden it was alive with shellfire from cannons, mortars and machine guns in particular. Just imagine the worst thunderstorm you can remember — maybe it's five or 10 minutes and then it's over — but this went on and on and on.

You hear the motor going full blast and you've got all the 35 guys in the boat so packed in you couldn't move, and all you want to do is get out of that place. We were bouncing up and down in the water, and there were diesel fumes, and there was smoke from the shells. Guys were puking all over the place — I was lucky, I didn't get seasick.

Nobody was talking. Everybody was scared to death. You could see ships blowing up. The Germans were throwing everything they had. I'm sure I wet my pants. I didn't think we were going to make it.

I was looking around and this landing craft 50 to 100 yards away just disappeared; it blew up. You see all kinds of things flying through the air. At that instant, the only thing in my mind was: I've got to get ashore.

We were under such heavy fire, we were misdirected and we got separated from the 2nd Rangers. We were supposed to land exactly at Dog Red [a western sector of Omaha Beach], and we were off easily 500 yards. We landed at Vierville.

Our heavy equipment like our radio transmitters and receivers were all lost in the commotion. And also the tanks that were supposed to come ashore, which were amphibious, they lost all of them, so there was no protection.

There was an LCI [landing craft infantry] carrying 200 troops that came in, landed on a mine and then a shell hit it. I saw that. It was flaming like you wouldn't believe, and with the shock wave from it, I thought we were gone.

You didn't have time to try to analyze what was going on. All you wanted to do was get off, get down in the water so they couldn't see you and hope that you didn't catch a bullet.

They dropped the ramp and the British coxswain yelled, "Everybody off!" We couldn't get off fast enough. I was in the middle. Some guys got in the water and you didn't see them come back up. A lot of guys drowned; we were too far out.

All this ammunition was coming at us. On the ramp, I looked to my right and a fella just dropped down. He was dead; he was hit in the head.

The water was up to my shoulders. You heard this pfft-pfft-pfft that was machine-gun bullets hitting the water. You tried to get down as much as you could and keep out of the firepower. There was a bluff ahead, and everybody on it was firing at us. There was a 4-foot sea wall in front of it. Only thing you could think about was: How can I get ashore and get to that wall?